Despite being a web-traffic powerhouse, ‘The Front Page of the Internet’ is yet to have an official native app on the world’s most popular mobile platform. However, that may be about to change soon, as per an announcement on the site by the Product Manager for Native Mobile at Reddit, Ms. Ashley Higgins, a.k.a ahiggz. Despite the message board’s huge popularity and extensive community, there has been no official main app for Reddit yet, although, there is an official AMA app that allows redditors to participate in various AMAs by asking, sorting and voting on questions, just as one would, on the website itself. The message board however, has multiple popular third-party apps on Android, including popular ones like ‘Relay for Reddit’, ‘Sync for Reddit’, and of course, by far the most popular one of the lot, ‘Reddit is Fun’. While all of these apps can used for free, they all have their paid versions as well, which typically get rid of the ads and come with other little bells and whistles for a few bucks.
As for iOS, the company last year bought a third party app called ‘Alien Blue’, which was the most popular third-party Reddit app on iOS at the time. Talks regarding the impending release of an Android app started doing the rounds at about the same time, without anything materializing thus far. Now however, that’s about to change sooner rather than later, as according to the aforementioned post on Reddit, the beta version will see a limited rollout “in the next month or two”. The sign-up process has already begun as of Friday, December 11th and will be open till the morning (11AM PST) of next Friday, December 18th. While all redditors are free to sign-up, only ‘a few thousands’ will be handpicked by the Reddit team, which is just as well, seeing as the site apparently has over 200 million monthly active users from around the world.
Of course, the march towards creating a native, official Android app for the world’s largest and most popular online message board is not exactly a new one. As mentioned already, there have been talks at least since last year that the company is hiring engineers with a view towards rolling out the much-demanded software. Back in September this year, the website’s Mobile Engineer, Mr. David Forsythe (who goes by dforsyth on the message board), released a screenshot, thereby giving redditors a sneak peek into the look of the upcoming software, which is still very much a work in progress, seeing as even the beta version is months away from release.